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What really makes this encryption effective is that like the real life machine, the wheels rotate either to the left or right after each character. So the relationship between each character shifts constantly. As a result, even repeating characters such as 'AAAAAAAAAA' are represented with garbage such as 'BGPVLKHWCD'.
It would be virtually impossible to look at the encrypted characters and determine their relationship to one another. There are so many possibilities and combinations of the above criteria, it would have to be solved through brute force. I am not a mathematician, so if anyone can tell me the possible combinations, I would appreciate it.
When the Germans used this machine, it baffled the Allies, who frantically tried to break it with no success. It wasn't until a German U-Boat was forced to surface in a naval battle and was captured that the Allies got a huge break. An Enigma machine was captured along with a code book that showed the information needed to decrypt the messages.
The U-Boat was scuttled and the crew was kept in a top secret location. The U-Boat was simply considered lost during battle and Germans continued the war not knowing the truth.
When the war in the Atlantic turned for the worse, the Germans, who believed their code to be unbreakable, believed that there were spies in their top level officials. They never considered that the code was being decrypted through a captured machine, so as a result, they set up elaborate networks to try and find these spies. Paranoia being what it was, many loyal German officers were tortured and murdered for treason, even though they had committed no such offense.
NOTE: Binary files require Microsoft's Visual Basic 6.0 Runtime Library (usually pre-installed in Windows XP). |
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